Poems, p.1
Poems, page 1
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Acknowledgments
Publisher’s Note
THE COMPLETE POEMS (1969)
North & South (1946)
The Map
The Imaginary Iceberg
Casabianca
The Colder the Air
Wading at Wellfleet
Chemin de Fer
The Gentleman of Shalott
Large Bad Picture
From the Country to the City
The Man-Moth
Love Lies Sleeping
A Miracle for Breakfast
The Weed
The Unbeliever
The Monument
Paris, 7 A.M.
Quai d’Orléans
Sleeping on the Ceiling
Sleeping Standing Up
Cirque d’Hiver
Florida
Jerónimo’s House
Roosters
Seascape
Little Exercise
The Fish
Late Air
Cootchie
Songs for a Colored Singer
Anaphora
A Cold Spring (1955)
A Cold Spring
Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance
The Bight
A Summer’s Dream
At the Fishhouses
Cape Breton
View of The Capitol from The Library of Congress
Insomnia
The Prodigal
Faustina, or Rock Roses
Varick Street
Four Poems
I / Conversation
II / Rain Towards Morning
III / While Someone Telephones
IV / O Breath
Letter to N.Y.
Argument
Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore
The Shampoo
Questions of Travel (1965)
BRAZIL
Arrival at Santos
Brazil, January 1, 1502
Questions of Travel
Squatter’s Children
Manuelzinho
Electrical Storm
Song for the Rainy Season
The Armadillo
The Riverman
Twelfth Morning; or What You Will
The Burglar of Babylon
ELSEWHERE
Manners
Sestina
First Death in Nova Scotia
Filling Station
Sunday, 4 A.M.
Sandpiper
From Trollope’s Journal
Visits to St. Elizabeths
Translations from the Portuguese (1969)
Carlos Drummond de Andrade
Seven-Sided Poem
Don’t Kill Yourself
Travelling in the Family
The Table
João Cabral de Melo Neto
From The Death and Life of a Severino
New and Uncollected Work (1969)
Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics
Giant Toad
Strayed Crab
Giant Snail
The Hanging of the Mouse
Some Dreams They Forgot
Song
House Guest
Trouvée
Going to the Bakery
Under the Window: Ouro Prêto
GEOGRAPHY III (1976)
In the Waiting Room
Crusoe in England
Night City
The Moose
12 O’Clock News
Poem
One Art
The End of March
Objects & Apparitions
Five Flights Up
NEW AND UNCOLLECTED POEMS (1978–1979)
Santarém
North Haven
Pink Dog
Sonnet
UNCOLLECTED POEMS (1933–1969)
The Flood
A Word with You
Hymn to the Virgin
Three Sonnets for the Eyes
I / Tidal Basin
II
III
Three Valentines
The Reprimand
The Mountain
The Wit
Exchanging Hats
A Norther—Key West
Thank-You Note
UNCOLLECTED TRANSLATIONS (1950–1975)
FROM THE FRENCH
Max Jacob
Rainbow
Patience of an Angel
Banks
Hell Is Graduated
FROM THE PORTUGUESE
Manuel Bandeira
My Last Poem
Brazilian Tragedy
Joaquim Cardozo
Cemetery of Childhood
Elegy for Maria Alves
Carlos Drummond de Andrade
Infancy
In the Middle of the Road
Family Portrait
Vinícius de Moraes
Sonnet of Intimacy
Anonymous
Four Sambas
Rio de Janeiro
Kick him out of office!
Marshál, Illustrious Marshál
Come, my mulata
FROM THE SPANISH
Octavio Paz
The Key of Water
Along Galeana Street
The Grove
January First
APPENDIX I: Selected Unpublished Manuscript Poems
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
Good-Bye —
“We went to the dark cave of the street-corner…”
In a Room
To Be Written on the Mirror in Whitewash
The Street by the Cemetery
For A.B.
Pleasure Seas
“It is marvellous to wake up together…”
Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box
The Soldier and the Slot-Machine
“I had a bad dream…”
The Owl’s Journey
“Where are the dolls who loved me so…”
A Short, Slow Life
Suicide of a Moderate Dictator
Keaton
Death of Mimoso
Apartment in Leme
“Dear, my compass…”
Inventory
A Drunkard
Lines written in a copy of Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cook Book,
given to Frank Bidart
Vague Poem ( Vaguely love poem)
Breakfast Song
For Grandfather
Salem Willows
Florida Revisited
APPENDIX II: Contents of Elizabeth Bishop’s Books of Poetry on First
Publication, 1946–1977
Index of Titles and First Lines
Also by Elizabeth Bishop
Copyright
Acknowledgments
The publisher wishes to acknowledge the following for assistance with research and the preparation of the text: Dean Rogers, Laura Finkel, and Ron Patkus of Vassar College Libraries Special Collections; Leslie Morris, Heather Cole, Rachel Howarth, James Capobianco, Mary Haegert, Susan Halpert, Emilie Hardman, Micah Hoggatt, Emily Walhout, and Joseph Zajac of the Houghton Library, Harvard University; Elizabeth E. Fuller and Karen Schoenewaldt of the Rosenbach Museum and Library; John Cordovez, Nasima Hasnat, Thomas
Lannon, and Lee Spilberg of the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library; and Catherine Barnett, Paulo Britto, Eleanor Chai, Frank Bidart, Eamon Grennan, Paul Keegan, Carmen Oliveira, Barbara Page, Alice Quinn, and Lloyd Schwartz. Thanks above all to Saskia Hamilton, for her painstaking care in helping prepare this edition.
Publisher’s Note
This edition of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems, printed for the centenary of her birth, includes all the poems and translations she published between 1933 and her death in 1979.* It preserves the distinction Bishop made between poems and translations collected in volumes and those she left out of her books after their appearance in periodicals and anthologies. It follows her selection and arrangement of The Complete Poems (1969) and Geography III (1976), supplemented by four late poems left uncollected at her death. The other published poems and translations that she chose to omit from her two final volumes are gathered in two parts in a final section.
Bishop recalled that, as a young poet, a visit with Marianne Moore would leave her uplifted and determined “never to try to publish anything until I thought I’d done my best with it, no matter how many years it took—or never to publish at all.” The many poems in her archive that were left nearly finished attest to the strength of her resolve. The Complete Poems was itself a selection (“Omissions are not accidents,” as the epigraph to Marianne Moore’s own Complete Poems warns). It provided the occasion for Bishop to winnow and revise as she gathered her work. Revisions here included changes to the original ordering and contents of her three collections to date ( North & South, A Cold Spring, and Questions of Travel). She offered a selection of her translations of Portuguese poetry, which is integral to the structure of this book (much as
&n bsp; “Objects & Apparitions,” a translation of a poem by Octavio Paz, is integral to Geography III), but excluded earlier translations of French poetry. And she chose to include only three early works (“The Hanging of the Mouse,” “Some Dreams They Forgot,” and “Song”) to accompany recently finished work.
As editions of her poems published since her death have demonstrated, Bishop left behind a large body of other material that she did not feel “I’d done my best with” or “did not finish or publish for other reasons” but which is of unquestionable literary interest. Several poems not published in her lifetime first appeared in cleaned-up transcriptions in the 1983 edition of The Complete Poems, 1927–1979. From 1983 to 2006, books and articles by Bishop scholars quoted and discussed other texts. These and other discoveries were presented and annotated in Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box (2006). Still more have appeared since in reviews, and in the Library of America’s Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters (2008). * An appendix to the present volume includes a group of these manuscript poems, which offer readers a view of Bishop’s working methods.
A second appendix lists the contents of Elizabeth Bishop’s books of poetry as first published from 1946 to 1977.
* The year 1933 has been taken as a point of departure, being the date of the earliest published poem included in Bishop’s selection for The Complete Poems (1969).
* Even so, the published texts have not exhausted what the archive contains—including manuscript poems and translations as yet unpublished, as well as unpublished drafts of eventually completed and published poems, poems by others, song lyrics (blues, ballads) written down or translated, and notebook entries.
THE COMPLETE POEMS (1969)
North & South (1946)
The Map
Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?
The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still.
Labrador’s yellow, where the moony Eskimo
has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays,
under a glass as if they were expected to blossom,
or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish.
The names of seashore towns run out to sea,
the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains
—the printer here experiencing the same excitement
as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.
These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger
like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.
Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is,
lending the land their waves’ own conformation:
and Norway’s hare runs south in agitation,
profiles investigate the sea, where land is.
Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?
—What suits the character or the native waters best.
Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West.
More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.
The Imaginary Iceberg
We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship,
although it meant the end of travel.
Although it stood stock-still like cloudy rock
and all the sea were moving marble.
We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship;
we’d rather own this breathing plain of snow
though the ship’s sails were laid upon the sea
as the snow lies undissolved upon the water.
O solemn, floating field,
are you aware an iceberg takes repose
with you, and when it wakes may pasture on your snows?
This is a scene a sailor’d give his eyes for.
The ship’s ignored. The iceberg rises
and sinks again; its glassy pinnacles
correct elliptics in the sky.
This is a scene where he who treads the boards
is artlessly rhetorical. The curtain
is light enough to rise on finest ropes
that airy twists of snow provide.
The wits of these white peaks
spar with the sun. Its weight the iceberg dares
upon a shifting stage and stands and stares.
This iceberg cuts its facets from within.
Like jewelry from a grave
it saves itself perpetually and adorns
only itself, perhaps the snows
which so surprise us lying on the sea.
Good-bye, we say, good-bye, the ship steers off
where waves give in to one another’s waves
and clouds run in a warmer sky.
Icebergs behoove the soul
(both being self-made from elements least visible)
to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible.
Casabianca
Love’s the boy stood on the burning deck
trying to recite “The boy stood on
the burning deck.” Love’s the son
stood stammering elocution
while the poor ship in flames went down.
Love’s the obstinate boy, the ship,
even the swimming sailors, who
would like a schoolroom platform, too,
or an excuse to stay
on deck. And love’s the burning boy.
The Colder the Air
We must admire her perfect aim,
this huntress of the winter air
whose level weapon needs no sight,
if it were not that everywhere
her game is sure, her shot is right.
The least of us could do the same.
The chalky birds or boats stand still,
reducing her conditions of chance;
air’s gallery marks identically
the narrow gallery of her glance.
The target-center in her eye
is equally her aim and will.
Time’s in her pocket, ticking loud
on one stalled second. She’ll consult
not time nor circumstance. She calls
on atmosphere for her result.
(It is this clock that later falls
in wheels and chimes of leaf and cloud.)
Wading at Wellfleet
In one of the Assyrian wars
a chariot first saw the light
that bore sharp blades around its wheels.
That chariot from Assyria
went rolling down mechanically
to take the warriors by the heels.
A thousand warriors in the sea
could not consider such a war
as that the sea itself contrives
but hasn’t put in action yet.
This morning’s glitterings reveal
the sea is “all a case of knives.”
Lying so close, they catch the sun,
the spokes directed at the shin.
The chariot front is blue and great.
The war rests wholly with the waves:
they try revolving, but the wheels
give way; they will not bear the weight.
Chemin de Fer
Alone on the railroad track
I walked with pounding heart.
The ties were too close together
or maybe too far apart.
The scenery was impoverished:
scrub-pine and oak; beyond
its mingled gray-green foliage
I saw the little pond
where the dirty hermit lives,
lie like an old tear
holding onto its injuries
lucidly year after year.
The hermit shot off his shot-gun
and the tree by his cabin shook.
Over the pond went a ripple.
The pet hen went chook-chook.
“Love should be put into action!”
screamed the old hermit.
Across the pond an echo
tried and tried to confirm it.
The Gentleman of Shalott
Which eye’s his eye?
Which limb lies
next the mirror?
For neither is clearer
nor a different color
than the other,
nor meets a stranger
in this arrangement
of leg and leg and
arm and so on.
To his mind
it’s the indication
